A provocative, inspiring look at the underlying cause of our polarization and dysfunction.
The conservative political historian and founding National Affairs editor surveys a nation whose institutions are in crisis.
Continuing a project begun in 2016 with The Fractured Republic, Levin observes that contemporary Americans are “living through a social crisis,” one that manifests in gridlock, bitterness, and “a culture war that seems increasingly to be dividing us into two armed camps angrily confronting each other in every corner and crevice of American life.” It’s not so much that we’ve lost faith in and patience with people who disagree with us, writes the author, but that we’ve witnessed the disintegration of the institutions that sustained us: journalism, which tends to an urban elitism; education, which imposes orthodoxies of political correctness; and government, which has descended into a cesspool of do-nothingism. Even after Richard Nixon left office in disgrace, he observes, more than half of Americans “expressed confidence in the presidency”; the current figure has fallen to a third. As for Congress, only 11% of respondents think it’s doing anything positive—small wonder, Levin writes, since the members of that body “have come to understand themselves most fundamentally as players in a larger cultural ecosystem, the point of which is not legislating or governing but rather a kind of performative outrage for a partisan audience.” It is perhaps to the benefits of the elites—who, Levin writes, used to number different casts of characters: one for education, one for politics, one for media, and the like, but who now largely comprise a single body—that Americans are divided and that institutions are weak. The revival of the pure, original notion of what our institutions are meant to do—the judiciary being a rare but not wholly uncompromised exception—“is essential to the revival of legitimate authority,” the implication being that much present authority is not legitimate, and the charge falls on every citizen to do something about the mess by becoming active in reform.
A provocative, inspiring look at the underlying cause of our polarization and dysfunction.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5416-9927-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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